(Closer to eight months, but who's counting? By the way, this is yet another overdue completion of a post that's been sitting in the draft folder for oh... six? eight weeks?)
So, obviously, if it had been us doing this by ourselves, it would have taken at least three weeks and involved a minimum of six trips to Home Despot, at least one to the ER, and several dozen cases of beer. Bob, being the professional that he is, managed to install all three fixtures in one day. Of course, I had to help him (and another guy) get the tub up the stairs, and then help again when the vanity went up, but he got it done.
I took this when he went out for lunch (and to grab a couple of feeder hoses because the ones that came with the tub were shit):
Aside from the three-ring circus of trying to get the tub up the stairs, the most exciting part of the day was when we got the part where we needed to install the vanity. We had managed, between Bob and I, to get the damn thing up to the upstairs landing, where we left it while he installed the taps and other bits (easier than trying to do them in place). But moving the vanity into the bathroom itself was, well... trickier.
As I may have mentioned, the bathroom itself is exactly five feet wide. That's sixty inches for you metric users out there. The vanity is JUST under 60 inches. And when I say JUST, I mean it's really 59 and 63/64ths. Complicating the matter is the location of the water feed for the toilet, and its position relative to the door of the bathroom. See, to get the vanity into place, we have to slide it straight through the door, and then straight back to the wall. The toilet is slightly to the right when looking in through the door, but the water pipe that provides the water to the toilet is, of course, almost directly in front of the door and in line with where we needed to slide the vanity.
Marvel at my skills of an artist!
Oh, and did I mention that if we broke that pipe, there'd be no fixing it without opening up that wall again? Yeah.
Anyway, we managed to get the vanity through the door and into the bathroom without smashing the pipe, but when we went to slide it back into place, well, that's when we encountered another small problem. It turns out that the walls on either side of the vanity were very slightly bowed, either from Tony the mudder feathering out around the electrical boxes, or because, I dunno, I suck at drywalling. Whatever the case, getting the vanity past the edge of the door required first a little surgery to the vanity itself:
And then some serious gouging and scraping of our nice drywall/paint job. Which I did not take a picture of because, quite frankly, it hurt.
The next step in the process (or somewhere in there at least) was to order and install the blinds. Owing to the shape of the window (as shown in detail in the last post), we had to order custom-made horizontal blinds. Also owing to the direction the window was facing, i.e., south, we had to order real wood blinds to prevent any warping or shrinking from the sunlight. Needless to say, they weren't exactly cheap, but our options were a little limited so we ponied up, measured the windows carefully, and ordered them from Rona.
Within a couple of weeks or so, we got the call that they were ready to be picked up, so the War Department drove all the way out there on a Thursday night while I was at my woodworking course (more on that in a later post) to pick them up. Of course, they couldn't find them. They were somewhere in the store, at least according to the computer, but not anywhere the employees could actually see. So she had to drive home empty handed and I had to drive all the way out there the next night to pick them up. I did manage to raise enough of a stink that they gave me a gift card to make up for our trouble, but it was still annoying.
What was even more annoying than THAT, thought, was that the damn things didn't actually fit. See, we had made our careful measurements against the edge of the windows themselves. But the blinds were two inches thick, which meant that the inside corners overlapped each other.
Of course, I wasn't exactly welcome at Rona at that point, so we had to perform some surgery on our new, very expensive blinds. I had to disassemble each one, cut off a little bit of the metal spacer at the top (some from each side, of course, because why would anything be EASY?), trim the wooden slats CAREFULLY in the chop saw, and then turn them over to Amy, who stained the fresh cut ends the same color as the rest of the blinds (and did an amazing job, too). Only then could I actually hang the things.
And I'm not even going to talk about hooking up the damn shower pipe and curtain ring. Let's just say Bob needed to come back and show me a few things, and leave it at that.
Anyway, to cut a loooooooong story short (can you tell this is the point I finally sat down to try to write the rest of this post), like, a couple or three months, the Ba'ath Bath is no more. We now have a master bathroom befitting the name, and I will shut up and let you enjoy the pictures, much as the War Department enjoys the fruits of our labours:
(Here's one without the flash so you can get a better idea of the actual colors:)
There's one TEENY little job left, and that's to fashion a brace for the shower head and hang the curtain, but given that we won't need the shower any time soon, and the War Department has already been enjoying the tub, I think we can safely call this project done.
Next time: Raw pine! Woo!
The next step in the process (or somewhere in there at least) was to order and install the blinds. Owing to the shape of the window (as shown in detail in the last post), we had to order custom-made horizontal blinds. Also owing to the direction the window was facing, i.e., south, we had to order real wood blinds to prevent any warping or shrinking from the sunlight. Needless to say, they weren't exactly cheap, but our options were a little limited so we ponied up, measured the windows carefully, and ordered them from Rona.
Within a couple of weeks or so, we got the call that they were ready to be picked up, so the War Department drove all the way out there on a Thursday night while I was at my woodworking course (more on that in a later post) to pick them up. Of course, they couldn't find them. They were somewhere in the store, at least according to the computer, but not anywhere the employees could actually see. So she had to drive home empty handed and I had to drive all the way out there the next night to pick them up. I did manage to raise enough of a stink that they gave me a gift card to make up for our trouble, but it was still annoying.
What was even more annoying than THAT, thought, was that the damn things didn't actually fit. See, we had made our careful measurements against the edge of the windows themselves. But the blinds were two inches thick, which meant that the inside corners overlapped each other.
Of course, I wasn't exactly welcome at Rona at that point, so we had to perform some surgery on our new, very expensive blinds. I had to disassemble each one, cut off a little bit of the metal spacer at the top (some from each side, of course, because why would anything be EASY?), trim the wooden slats CAREFULLY in the chop saw, and then turn them over to Amy, who stained the fresh cut ends the same color as the rest of the blinds (and did an amazing job, too). Only then could I actually hang the things.
And I'm not even going to talk about hooking up the damn shower pipe and curtain ring. Let's just say Bob needed to come back and show me a few things, and leave it at that.
Anyway, to cut a loooooooong story short (can you tell this is the point I finally sat down to try to write the rest of this post), like, a couple or three months, the Ba'ath Bath is no more. We now have a master bathroom befitting the name, and I will shut up and let you enjoy the pictures, much as the War Department enjoys the fruits of our labours:
(Here's one without the flash so you can get a better idea of the actual colors:)
There's one TEENY little job left, and that's to fashion a brace for the shower head and hang the curtain, but given that we won't need the shower any time soon, and the War Department has already been enjoying the tub, I think we can safely call this project done.
Next time: Raw pine! Woo!
